I haven't read Beloved, but while my English teacher colleagues at my school in Maryland all loved it and put on the reading list, my students, even the most brilliant ones, almost to a single person hated it. I did see Toni Morrison interviewed on TV once and she took the opportunity for some fairly spectacular white bashing (which does not prejudice me against her books, which I may still get around to). I was watching with my mother, and at one point Morrison said, "I'm not trying to demonize white people." To which my mother, who is not a highly educated person but has her moments, responded, "Yes you are, you bitch."

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach

Nice to see that Ray Carver's Where I'm Calling From made the list. The reason for such praise for Delilo and Roth escapes me. Beloved is a fine book, but best American fiction of the past quarter-century? And Updike's Rabbit novels hardly meet the "past 25 years" criterion. What the hell's wrong with the Times? (Of course, any rag that would give a sophomoric idiot like Maureen Dowd a soapbox has no claim to credibility.)

"Most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." ~Leo Tolstoy

"It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them. To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character." ~Dale Turner

"Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either." ~Albert Einstein
"Truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it; but, in the end, there it is." ~Winston Churchill

I was trying to avoid this observation, but a case could be made that the results reflect on the poverty of the American novel in general in the last quarter century.

There is also the problem that 25 years doesn't take us back very far. It is hard to believe that Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is now outside that limit, as are most of the works of Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach